Wesley's Tool-Box

My Makibox 3D printer was doing very well up to early this month. But then suddenly, it decided to stop pushing the plastic filament into the extruder. After some manual pushing, it worked again for a while, but then it'd stop yet again. Looking at the filament, I saw some grinding, so I initially suspected a clogged nozzle. But if I disengage the filament from the feeder and push the filament in by hand, the nozzle had no problem putting out the material. So I took the filament feeder apart.

Now, Makibox's filament feeder is called "Zen Drive". It consists of a stepping motor with toothed axis and a tension wheel. The teeth "bites into" the filament to make it move, while the wheel allows the filament to catch onto the teeth in a consistent manner. When I disassembled the Zen Drive assembly, I noticed that two of the wheel's spokes had snapped. Snapped spoke meant that a consistent pressure couldn't be applied to the filament. This was the cause of the inconsistent filament feed I experienced. It was time for a repair.

Musical instruments must be shaped and tuned right to have proper sound coming out of them. If a 3D design of an instrument is shaped right, a 3D printer that can accurately reproduce it would make a properly working version, then. Makibox had been working reasonably, provided that I don't push it too far. So I wanted to see if it was up to the challenge. The result is what you see here.

Looks alright, doesn't it? But can it make any sound at all? I'll let you see (and hear) for yourself with this video.


Read on to see the steps taken to make one.

A 3D printer needs a host software that sends various commands for printing. In the case of Makibox, an in-house developed one called 5DPrint does this. It's made as a Chrome web app, which runs on top of the Chrome web browser, and thus supports multiple platforms.

Unfortunately, a recent Chrome update seems to have broken the data communications to the printer, and many users are reporting that 5DPrint no longer recognizes the printer, including myself. Luckily, there are other, more capable host software out there. One of them is Repetier-Host.


As you can see, it has no problems making Makibox work. However, a bit of configuration is necessary. Read on to find out.

It seems that the Makibox 3D printer that I built doesn't have too much movement errors, so I tried printing some small animals, on the request of my daughter Celine. They take around 30 to 60 minutes to print, and look alright. Printing several at a time make some edges rough, though. Read on for a couple of in-production photos.

The designers of Makibox aimed to reduce the headaches of using a 3D printer, but it does not mean it's trouble-free. In fact, there can be some problems because you're dealing with plastics, a tangible material.

One problem I've encountered was a leaky hot-end nozzle. Specifically, it's leaking where it's not supposed to, on top of the head. When the leak grew too much, the printer tended to stop printing. The incomplete squirrels shown here are such results.


Thankfully, I had a spare hot-end, and that worked without any problems. The leaky one has been sent back for another replacement. With this problem out of the way and printing as much as I would like, I noticed another problem creeping up.

A home 3D printer has myriad of uses, but I think toy printing immediately stand out if you have children. Makibox can print in non-toxic (after printing, anyway) ABS polymer, so I set out to make a simple plastic figure for my daughters after the test prints were done.

One thing to note is that the extruder broke down a few weeks ago, so I had to send it back to Hong Kong for replacement. That's why there had been a lack of blog posts about the 3D printer since early January. I've got my replacement, and it works perfectly so far. Better than the original one, in fact.


I selected a squirrel design from Thingiverse because it didn't look to complicated, yet cute enough so that the kids would like to play with it. It turned out that I was right on both accounts. Keep reading for more pictures.